HOW good it was to be at Burton Town Hall with like-minded people all opposed to the proposed massive intensive pig farmat Foston in South Derbyshire, and all there seemed concerned about animal welfare.
PeterMelchett, director of The Soil Association, showed us a delightful film of his huge free range organic pig farm where piglets were rushing here and there nosing into everything, rather like puppies, and mother sows together were sunning themselves (very sociable creatures!).
A far cry fromintensive farming.
Are we really so greedy for cheap meat that we want to see animals crushed up together unable to see the light of day or enjoy their birthright or express their natural behaviour? Pigs are very intelligent animals, yet see dogs cooped up in similar squalor and the RSPCA would be there in a minute, and there would be an outcry. People would be prosecuted.
Because of the unnaturalness of factory farming, animals have to routinely be fed with more and more antibiotics (60 per cent of all antibiotics are given to animals here, 80 per cent in the USA) and so the bugs become resistant, which of course affects humans.
I quote from The Independent of June 17: ‘If they aren’t stopped soon theWHO warns we are facing a doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics’ and ‘many of the world’s scientists are warning that one of the mightiest weapons doctors have against sickness is being rendered useless—so a few people can get richer for a while’.
MRSA, C Diff, salmonella, E.coli, CJD and so on have all spread from animals to people.
‘Small groups of rich people, determined to maximise profits, are bamboozling politicians into serving their interests and into ignoring the interests of the vast majority of the population—self juntas of profit’, says The Independent.
More of us need to speak out, like Linda Wardale in Lincolnshire, who spearheaded the campaign against Nocton Dairies (factory farming of dairy cows) and won when the idea was abandoned.
Maybe we could all eat a little less meat of much better quality, farmed with integrity and compassion and forethought in the interests of people and animals alike.
Dorothy Taberner
Birches Close
Stretton
